“With your skin tone, there’s not a shade that wouldn’t look lovely on you, Mrs. Donovan.” Sydney winces at the burn in the pit of her stomach but manages to put on a convincing smile. It’s a small price to pay to keep her more generous clients loyal. Plus it breaks up the monotony of the day, reminding Sydney of a time, centuries and centuries ago, when her powers weren’t limited to quaint parlor tricks. Her smile becomes more genuine with the thought, but then Sir Calvin starts up with the yapping, and all at once her headache’s back. Sydney goes for another doggie biscuit, but Mrs. Donovan shakes her head.
“Too much of a good thing,” she says, then leans back into her chair, eyes closed and fingers splayed carefully apart. “Don’t want to spoil his appetite.”
Sydney tries to tune Sir Calvin out, but he’s right there in her face as she gives Mrs. Donovan her pedicure, which is torture enough with those meaty bunions of hers and heels that make even the roughest emery boards envious. Sydney’s already pushed herself too far this morning, but she draws anyway, rubbing her warm hand under Sir Calvin’s throat. His bark mutes, though his mouth keeps moving, which angers him even more. He nips Sydney, soundlessly, but drawing blood. Sydney seethes and gives him the eye. There’s no way this little monster is going to cost her her tip, not after all she’s put into it.
“Oh, what a playful little boy,” she coos at him, stroking his head, pushing thoughts of calmness into his mind. The emptiness presses up against her rib cage and threatens to break through. She forces it back, looking for any spare nook, enough to make this damned Zed hybrid go to sleep, but his will is too strong. Sydney promises her body that she’ll give it time to heal, and she’ll even feed tonight if she has to. A small cry of pain escapes her, but finally the Zed hybrid lies still in its master’s lap. Sydney doubles forward, catching herself on the leg of Mrs. Donovan’s chair.
She takes a quick glance around the salon, hoping her foolish antics have gone unnoticed, but Zinhle Mpande stares back at her fiercely, her thick jaw set, cheeks tight, eyes intense like they’re filled with the knowledge of every single one of her Zulu ancestors. She grabs a stack of towels and stalks toward Sydney’s station.
“Fresh towels,” she says perkily in English, before slamming them down beside the alphie. She whispers in the Zulu tongue so that Mrs. Donovan can’t understand. “Haw! I know what you are.”
Sydney gulps, then moves her attention to Mrs. Donovan’s heels, scrubbing feverishly at them with an emery paddle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says sweetly in return.
Zinhle clucks her tongue. “Umuthi omnyama,” she says, picking up a bit of biscuit, then crumbling it in her hand before storming off. Black muti, dark spirits conjured through doggie treats nonetheless. Great. Sydney closes her eyes and sighs to herself. She’ll have to be more careful. If Zinhle thinks she’s a witch, it’s only a matter of time before the other ladies find out. Even if they don’t believe it, rumors are enough to cast suspicious looks in Sydney’s direction, making it harder to do those things she does.
A witch.
She laughs at the idea, wishing it were that simple.
Chapter 4
Nomvula and Mr. Tau
When Nomvula was a little girl, she used to fly. She’d spend hours at a time in the brush beyond her rural township of Addisen, swooping through the air and doing flips and pestering birds and flapping her wings so fast—hoping they’d take her as high as the sun or as far as the next township where the kids would play with her instead of teasing her about her nose, her eyes, her mother. But that was back when she was just a girl, eight or nine, back before she learned about what’s real and what’s pretend.
She’s ten now, thanks for asking.
The kids still tease her though, singing that her nose is sharp like a white man’s, like a buzzard’s. Her eyes are golden, so odd that even the adults won’t look right at her. Oh, they’re nice enough, but they always stare over her shoulder when they ask after her mother, even her Mama Zafu—her dear auntie who takes care of Nomvula when Ma falls into one of her sadnesses and cries for days and days and days.
Nomvula had a dream last night about Mr. Tau. Not a bad dream like Ma once had, of him forcing his privates into hers as she struggled and screamed and bit and bled out between her legs. Nearly tore her in half, Ma tells her each and every day. She tells anyone who will listen, which is just about nobody now. They all think she’s been touched by evil spirits. Poor thing, Nomvula hears them say. And that poor, poor daughter of hers, loving a mother who’s too broken to love anything back.
Nomvula’s dream was different, though. She’d watched Mr. Tau carve a woman from an old stump of wood, a beautiful woman with wings sprouting from her back. That’s what Mr. Tau did, make carvings and then sell them in town to tourists. She watched him from afar sometimes, sitting out in front of his tin shack, scraping and scraping and scraping wood with metal tools until it started looking like something. Nomvula always wanted to get closer so she could see what exactly Mr. Tau was doing, but Ma forbade her from going near Mr. Tau’s home—didn’t care a bit if Nomvula ran with knives or rolled in a dirty ditch or kissed older boys, but if Ma ever found out that Nomvula had so much as looked in Mr. Tau’s direction, she’d get a beating until Ma grew tired and started weeping all over again. Like she is now.
Ma’s eyes are distant as she lies still on her bed, like she’s staring off into the past. She hardly blinks, and the tears just trickle down over the ridge of her nose and drip down from her smooth, brown cheek and onto the faded grass mat. Nomvula tries to blot the tears away, but they come too quickly. She uses their last bit of water to make runny mielie pap for her mother and forces her to sip until it’s all gone. The rest of her morning consists of shooing away the flies that stick to her mother like she’s some dead thing, but then it’s nearly noon and Nomvula’s stomach has been rumbling for hours.
Nomvula gets up and puts on her favorite red shirt, though it’s getting tight for her and stretches funny across her chest now that she’s starting to get breasts like a woman. She ties up the wrap skirt Mama Zafu had given her, a pretty striped thing in the colors of blue and white, then goes outside to greet the day.